


Reaching for the Sun

by PenelopeAbigail



Series: Whumptober 2020 [26]
Category: Spider-Man (Video Game 2018), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Blindness, Day 26, Gen, If You Thought The Head Trauma Was Bad..., Sable Base, Unethical Experimentation, Whump, Whumptober 2020, concussion, hurt!Peter, migraines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:54:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27202082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PenelopeAbigail/pseuds/PenelopeAbigail
Summary: An unfortunately well-aimed bullet takes Spider-Man down.
Series: Whumptober 2020 [26]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1955698
Comments: 1
Kudos: 25
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	Reaching for the Sun

**Author's Note:**

> Day 26!  
> I know I'm posting this the night early, but that's because I'm going to have a pretty full day tomorrow, and I'm prone to forgetfulness. Better early than late, is what I always say.

It was two o’clock in the morning and her phone was ringing.

 _Why_ was her phone ringing?

It was bright, piercing the darkness, and MJ rolled over to bury her face in the pillow, blocking out the light. She flapped her hand around her nightstand, feeling for the vibrations, and sitting up with a groan.

Pete’s face was on the screen, and that was annoying.

Why was he calling her at such an ungodly hour? Didn’t he sleep at all?

Or was he banged up and refusing to just go to the hospital, again? There was no reason to _not_. There have been numerous instances of the kind nurses hiding him away in a back room so nobody would know he was there.

The only reason he didn’t want to go was that _he felt guilty about inconveniencing someone_.

That and he was probably scared Sable would swoop in and grab him. Or hurt someone on the way.

And she couldn’t say she didn’t worry the same. It was a good reason.

She understood, but _God, it was two in the morning!_

She tried not to sound tired, otherwise, he’d just feel guilty about waking her, and he shouldn’t if he needed help— _yes, he should, Pete: just go to the hospital_.

“Hey, Pete, what’s up?”

She sat up straighter and awoke fully when a woman’s voice answered her, “I’m sorry, Spider-Man isn’t here right now. You were the emergency contact on his phone.”

_Oh, God._

_No._

“Where is he?”

~

Pete was on his way home, dead tired from all the constant fighting.

Sable was intertwining themselves in all his battles, petty crimes, robberies, you name it. If Spider-Man _might_ be there to stop it, Sable was there to stop him.

Constantly. Everywhere. He was getting sick of it.

This had to stop _sometime_.

His weakness was the screaming of the innocents. He _couldn’t_ turn a blind eye and let them suffer on account of sleep.

So he followed the screams, coming upon another Sable base near the waterfront. _How were they throwing these together so fast?_

He had just been over here this morning— _yesterday morning?—_ and this wasn’t here!

And on that matter, why were they even awake? It was so late!

Why were they _harassing people_ at this hour? For everyone’s sake, everyone just needed to _go to sleep!_

Goodness gracious, why were people like this?

 _Pete_ just wanted to go to sleep.

But, no. Instead, he landed and perched on a light post on the outskirts of the camp, surveying the place.

He had definitely been more tired before, so this was nothing. He just had to work through his irritability. No need to be curt and rude to people he’s trying to save.

But the people he was trying to save them _from_ he could.

Maybe at this hour, there wouldn’t be the normal bazillion Sable henchmen prowling about. Maybe there would only be half of a bazillion.

He sprang to another pole, getting a closer look at things.

There were five people in the cage, three women, one man, and a freaking _child_ , all of them crying. They looked like a family.

Sable had grabbed a _family_ from the street.

Pete shook his head. This situation between the escaped prisoners out for blood and Sable’s goons with jet packs out for _his_ blood was getting worse and worse.

He was trying his best to put an end to it all, but Sable was adamant about capturing him (alive for secret experiments if he’d overheard them correctly) and the prisoners were adamant about capturing him (alive, too, so they could get revenge nice and slowly). So it seemed that either situation was hopeless on his part,because he didn’t wanna kill and wasn’t going to, and they didn’t wanna kill him either.

Basically a stale-mate, except for that if he beat them up, he’d just leave them for the police. If they beat him up, they’d take him and torture him to death. The stakes were higher for him. He just had to choose his preferred method of dying: on an examination table underground somewhere where no one would ever find his body, or on the dirty concrete underground somewhere where no one would ever find his body?

He wasn’t completely sure, but he figured Sable would treat him better than the prisoners would…

None of this changed how he fought or who or when. It just was the way it was.

God, what was even the point of that ramble? He was allowing his thoughts to distract him.

He’d been far more sleep-deprived before. This was _nothing_.

_Get it together, Pete! That family needed him._

Sneaking was his specialty, and it was easy, even if he was sleepy.

This late, they weren’t paying as much attention as they should have, and before he knew it, there was no one left in the yard. The family was safe, and the kid was watching him with a smile on his face.

He dropped down to simply walk to the cage, reassuring, “Everything is safe now, let’s get you out of here and back home.”

The mother was corralling the others while the man approached him, gave him a big hug that Pete wasn’t expecting at all, and said, “Thank you so much, Spider-Man, you rescued my family, my kids, thank you—“ and the little boy was wiping his eyes with one sleeve while the other wrapped itself around his right leg.

They couldn’t see it, but he was smiling beneath his mask.

This was why he did it, this was his reward. This was why he sacrificed sleep and stayed out late.

But then his spidey-sense went off, warning him of Danger to his left—a Sable guy?— _where had he come from? Pete was nowhere near sleepy enough to have let one slip by—_

Then he heard it, a gun cocking, and he turned quickly to see the man crouched by the gate, taking aim—

But there were innocents here, the man still hugging him and the child gripping his leg— _they were in the way, in the line of fire, Pete couldn’t_ —but he had to _try_ , so he shoved the guy off and swung the leg the kid was gripping, tackling them—

The gun fired, the bullet whizzed, the silence cracked.

Blood splattered.

Spider-Man yelled and collapsed atop the man and the child. The woman screamed and froze with the other two, still huddled in the cage.

The Sable agent laughed.

“Get back in the cage!” He yelled, approaching cautiously, gun still trained on the moaning hero on the ground.

Spider-Man was twitching but not really moving, and the Sable agent was scary and threatening, so the poor man just inched out from under the fallen hero slowly, not wanting to hurt him anymore, and grabbed his son to back into the cage.

Spider-Man stopped twitching as the brutal guard grabbed his leg and dragged him backward. The cage door wouldn’t have closed with the body in the way—and then something slammed across the yard, on the other side of the gate.

More Sable men marched around the corner, and the guard by Spider-Man waved them over.

“He’s alive,” he called to them, and kicked Spider-Man in his side, hard from the sound of the impact.

Poor Spider-Man didn’t flinch or move or nothing. He looked dead.

The Sable guy crouched down beside him, set his gun aside, and gently felt around Spider-Man’s neck, his chin, searching for and locating that seam where the mask stopped and the suit started. The mask squelched slightly when he pulled it up, but he didn’t stop until it was removed completely.

The bullet got his head, all right, just where he’d been aiming, but only the back, a graze. _Spider-Man’s reflexes were insane!_

The rest of the crew got near, started talking, saying things like, _Is that Spider-Man? We finally got him? What happened? Where’s everybody else? Is he alive?_

“Yeah, he is, help me stabilize him, get him secure.”

“He’s probably got gadgets and stuff on him, right?”

“Yeah, he used some on me yesterday, somewhere on his suit. Or in it.”

“He was on the phone when he hit us last week. Think it’s hard-wired in, too?”

“Gotta get him outa this thing.”

~

MJ met the woman who’d called in the McDonalds on 3rd, between 84th and 85th.

She had the suit in a backpack that she immediately handed over.

Apparently, as soon as Spider-Man was down and the cage door was shut, the Sable guys dropped their guard entirely to get him secured in a tent in the corner and had left the suit just lying in the mud.

The cage door wasn’t even locked. She and her family escaped, taking the suit with them. They didn’t know how to help Spider-Man, but they desperately wanted to, needing to repay him for saving their family.

MJ thanked her and took the suit, trying to process what had just happened.

~

The first thing he was aware of was the splitting headache. His head hurt worse than it ever had, felt as if Rhino personally stomped on it.

His eyes were closed, but there were galaxies dancing behind his eyelids. It hurt too, felt like stabbing somehow, like his eyeballs had it out for him or something.

The noise was deafening, so, _so_ loud, and he wanted to scream, to slam his hands over his ears and bury his head in a pillow, anything to make it all _stop_.

He couldn’t tell what was going on, just that his body wasn’t listening to what he was telling it.

His arms weren’t moving, his legs weren’t moving, his—and then his heart rate slowed and he slipped into the darkness.

~

When MJ got home, she laid the suit out, trying to figure out what had happened.

For privacy and secrecy’s sake, neither she nor the woman wanted to say too much, or give too many details. Who knew who was watching and listening— _this was just a precaution because she had just escaped from Sable with the Spider-Man suit, so, like, what if she was followed or something?_

She laid the suit across her bed to take a look. It was mostly muddy. The knuckles were spotty with blood but there wasn’t much to gather from it. Well, except the slice right down the middle, splitting the spider symbol in half and tearing apart the hard drive Pete kept there that operated the HUD in the mask.

When she turned it over, though, the rip in the mask and the blood that drenched the back neck were impossible to ignore.

He must have been shot in the back of his head, the lower part, grazed right across the occipital lobe if her placing of it was right.

She placed her hands over her mouth and sank to the ground.

At least the woman had said that he’d been alive when Sable took him away.

~

The pain was bearable when he next awoke.

Horrible and excruciating, but bearable nonetheless.

His ears were back to working condition, and he could hear beeping, metal clinking against metal, some sort of fluid pumping somewhere, and footsteps accompanied by voices, filtering in slowly, like he— _like he was healing—_

_He could feel himself healing...?_

It was awful, melting his brain, but there was something else, something not-blood pumping through his veins— _he was being drugged_ —but whoever was drugging him wasn’t aware of his metabolism. The drugs would wear off soon, were currently wearing off, which was probably why he was waking.

That or his wounds were healing— _what were his wounds again?_

Why was he in a hospital?

I mean, he _was_ in a hospital, right?

The beeping, the smells, the whole feel of the place, the IV in his arm— _that was where the drugs were coming from. He must’ve been hurt very badly to be waking in—_ but then there was pain slicing through him, through his wrist, must’ve been a scalpel, and he twitched, jerked upwards with a surprised yell.

_Was there something wrong with his arm?_

He realized there were restraints holding him down, his wrists straining against them— _and he could absolutely and very easily rip right through them, but he knew these nurses were only trying to help, so he tried his best to hold himself back—_ and the nurses were talking—they were talking and it wasn’t nice _—_

_“The morphine’s burned through him again—“_

_“What kind of_ metabolism _—“_

_“He’s awake!”_

_“Don’t let him up, he can’t escape! Not when we’ve finally got him!”_

His breathing was picking up, and if the EKG to his right was anything to go by, so was his heart rate. He opened his eyes to get a good look around, but apparently, they were already open and the room was just dark, completely and utterly black.

_“I’ve barely started the dissection, and you know he’s going to fight me.”_

_“We can put him under again, but we have a limited amount of morphine per week. He’ll burn it all up in a day at this rate.”_

His eyes weren’t working? Why weren’t his eyes working?

This smelled and sounded like a hospital, but the way the nurses were talking made it sound like something else, some _where_ else. What was going on?

What happened?

_“I’ll just run the tests without anesthetic, then.”_

_“How do we stop him from breaking free ‘cause you and I both know he’s more than capable if we give him the chance.”_

Something wasn’t right— _something bad was happening_?

He couldn’t quite remember what had happened, but words like “escape,” “dissection,” and “breaking free” were troubling, and he was starting to think he wasn’t in a hospital at all.

_“Any way we can get our hands on vibranium or adamantium?”_

_“The Sablinovas are powerful, but the transaction would be shrouded by so much red tape, it’d take too long, and we’d have to figure something else out, anyway.”_

This was sounding very not good, and Pete was starting to think that he really needed to get out, like, _right now_.

His wrist was burning something awful from that slice— _why was she doing that again?—_ but the restraints felt like general handcuffs, easy to break through, and he did.

The bad part was that he still couldn’t see— _why couldn’t he see?_

He brought his hands up toward his face and realized that he wasn’t wearing his mask, wasn’t wearing his suit at all, and he was mumbling and hadn’t realized that either, and the nurses— _they weren’t nurses, who were they—_ were moving about frantically, switching to a language that he didn’t speak.

And one grabbed his shoulders, tried to lay him back down with nice words like, “Easy, we’re just trying to help, we’re just—“ while the other was quickly moving around, clinking metal against metal— _looking for something maybe? Looking for what?_

“— _I can’t see, why can’t I see—“_

His head still hurt, increased all the more with every motion, and he wanted to feel it, feel what was wrong, figure this out, so he lifted his hands, _why did his head hurt_ , but there was a bandage, think and awful, squeezing too tightly, and the pain was worse at the back, at the base—

His arm was ripped away from his head and something pointy and sharp jabbed into it, probably drugs.

He told himself to keep calm, told himself not to hurt them, to stop moving and don’t fight back, and even if they were bad people trying to hurt him, he shouldn’t hurt them in his panic. He couldn’t see, so what if he accidentally killed someone?

He couldn’t let that happen, and besides, they were—they were just trying to—

His head felt fuzzy, the drugs working, and they successfully pushed him back, wrapped some sort of cool plastic around his wrists and the armrests— _was he in a dentist chair?_ —and then there was another sharp jab, a prick of a needle, more drugs—but also that scalpel was back, reopening the slice on his wrist that had already closed over.

His arms were shaking, he was whimpering, but there were too many drugs flooding into his brain, and he couldn’t stay awake any longer.

**Author's Note:**

> I think I might expand this one. Not sure yet, but I've got a plot brewing...


End file.
